


sparkling and invincible

by sure sure (getoffmysheets)



Series: Red in Tooth and Claw [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemon Feels, Daemon Separation, Daemon Touching, Eleven needs lots of hugs, Gen, Jim Hopper: Head Dad, Joyce Byers: Head Mom, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-23 08:06:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20888849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getoffmysheets/pseuds/sure%20sure
Summary: She's just...she's really hard to look at, is the thing.





	sparkling and invincible

**Author's Note:**

> Some quick notes for the purposes of this story:  
Daemon-touching, while not quite as taboo as it is in His Dark Materials, is still not a thing done casually – usually only between lovers, immediate family, or very close friends. Even so, to initiate first contact without warning or permission is a MASSIVE violation and not something to do outside of an emergency unless you’d like to lose your relationship to that person. 
> 
> The title of this story comes from the meaning of Andraste and Sindri's names.

She’s just…she’s just really, _really_ hard to look at, is the thing.

Jonathan and Nancy are especially having a tough time with it. Nancy’s daemon Celestis is a snowy owl, strikingly white with bright yellow eyes and his feathers are permanently fluffed with uneasiness. Initially, she’d had to run out to the porch, gulping deep breaths of cold night air to hold back her nausea and now Celestis preens at Mike’s daemon Themis, imitating his sister as a barking owl. Ithunna, shy and discrete, normally hides up Jonathan’s sleeve, but she’s been wrapped around his chest and shoulders like a harness ever since they realized that the little silver ball Mike gave El to feign an insect daemon is actually empty.

Joyce is surprised that the younger children don’t seem more disturbed, but she supposes that they’ve had a couple of days to get used it and at their age, that magnitude of horror is much harder to comprehend. You don’t just _meet_ someone who doesn’t have a daemon. It’s like seeing someone walk around without their own damn head. _Worse_, even.

Hop hardly seems to notice, which is almost even more disturbing.

“Doggy,” Eleven whispers, staring at his Andy with unblinking focus. It’s rude, it’s unimaginably rude to do more than glance at someone else’s daemon, but Andy holds her gaze steadily, as calm and watchful as she always is at Hop’s side. “Pretty doggy.”

“That’s Andraste,” Hopper rumbles, briefly petting Andy’s head. Even at the affection, her tail doesn’t wag, the only outward sign that Hop is less than comfortable with this situation. “Andy.”

“Anne-dee,” she repeats dutifully. It’s obvious that Eleven would like to pet her, but the boys have apparently already impressed upon her the rule that one must _never_ touch someone else’s daemon, unless the daemon initiates contact first. Joyce can’t really blame her for wanting to pet Andy, though.

Andraste is larger than an ordinary Chesapeake Bay retriever, just like Hopper is much larger than the average man, and her wavy coat settled into an almost silvery chocolate brown. Her big melting eyes are the color of toffee. She may not be a ‘beautiful’ daemon, in the traditional sense of the word, but she does look fantastic for cuddling.

She wonders if Eleven even knows what cuddling is.

It’s driving Joyce a little nuts and Sindri, vibrating with her agitation, paces on top of the cabinets overhead, chittering quietly to himself, dark face nearly hidden by the poor lighting. If it weren’t for his swinging silver-ticked tail, he might not be seen at all.

She’s alone.

She’s just a little girl and she’s completely alone in the world. No mother, no father, not even her own soul to keep her company.

Joyce can’t stand it.

The boys all yelp and jump in startled surprise when Sindri leaps from the top of the cabinet to land on the kitchen table, body twisting directions in midair so that he can look at the little girl sitting in their kitchen.

Eleven’s eyes widen as she goes from staring down Andraste to staring down Sindri. Her weak raspy voice repeats “Pretty.”

As a teenager, before time and motherhood made her appreciate it, Joyce had often wished Sindri were something a little more traditional or feminine. A poodle or a cat or a songbird. But Joyce herself was _not_ a poodle or a cat or a songbird. Her soul was a lemur, a diademed sifaka, and Eleven was right. He _was_ pretty, with golden fur on his arms and legs and silver fur along his black and tail. Sindri’s hands, face, ears, and feet were all black, a cowl of white fur around his small face. Enormous and round deep orange eyes examined Eleven.

“My name is Sindri,” he tells Eleven, voice clear and sharp. The very opposite of Eleven’s flat little croaks. The boys were staring in shock, too. Daemons might speak to each other, sometimes, but speaking directly to a human that wasn’t their own was just not done.

“Sindri,” El greets uncertainly.

Eleven’s eyes became as large as dinner plates when he swung himself right into her lap.

“_Mom_,” Jonathan wheezes, not embarrassed but horrified.

Joyce took in a sharp breath as Eleven’s little girl hands curled themselves into Sindri’s silver and gold fur. Her loneliness is _enormous,_ and Joyce has to turn away, putting a hand over her mouth to silence the sudden scream that wanted to erupt from her mouth.

No child should ever have to experience such a profound and crushing sense of displacement and solitude, never mind having it be the main emotion with which they experience the world. El begins crying softly and Sindri chitters at her soothingly, stroking the bare skull where she should have a beautiful head of hair like any other little girl.

They stay with her as the others prepare the bathtub. She falls asleep on the couch out of sheer emotional exhaustion, still holding Sindri like a teddy bear.

Joyce holds a finger to her lips as Hop returns to take them to the middle school. “She’s cold,” she murmurs, arms crossed over her chest. She runs an uneasy hand through her hair, unwashed and wild. “She’s always so cold.”

She’s heard Andy’s voice before, but the sound is still a surprise, coming from beside Hop’s hip. “Wouldn’t you be, if you were alone all the time?”

Joyce gives her a glance, but when she replies, she’s looking at Hop. It’s only polite. “Why aren’t you bothered by this?”

“I am,” he says with a soft sigh, glancing briefly in El’s direction. She looks like Sarah, but Sarah after she’d already died. Laying there, head shaved, with Belenos nothing but a sprinkling of gold Dust at the pillow beside her cheek. Except that El doesn’t have a Belenos. “But she ain’t the first.”

Sindri looks over at him sharply, eerie red-orange eyes focusing on him and Andy. “When you went to war?”

Okay, apparently they’re just at this stage where Andy talks in front of Joyce and Sindri talks in front of Hop. She remembers Sindri howling to high hell as he leapt on the mortician’s raccoon daemon, pulling hard at her ears and ripping off pieces of her fur in their fury. How Andy had pinned him to the floor with her broad chest and heavy paws until Joyce started sobbing and Hop could hold her close. Yeah, maybe that wasn’t so odd after all.

He sits heavily in her living room chair, still staring at the child sleeping on her sofa. “Yeah,” he admits quietly. “In ‘Nam. They called ‘em Ghost Children.”

“Jesus, Hop,” she breathes, covering her face. How monstrous did you have to be to do that to anyone, never mind a child?

She nearly misses Hop’s words. “She ain’t one.”

“What?” Startled, so startled she nearly trips over Andy before she quickly backs out of her way.

“She ain’t a Ghost Child, Joyce.” He smoothed a thoughtful hand over his mustache. “I already talked to the kids – not that it took much prying, that Henderson boy could talk the eaves off a house. She learns things. Understands things. Jane…or El, whatever – she does things on her own. And she’s…she’s strong. Most of ‘em die within a month. But she’s as strong as any girl her age.”

“But she…” Joyce makes a helpless, heartbroken gesture towards the girl.

“I know,” he agrees simply, leaning back in the chair. “Mike has this notion that she does have one. That it’s far away from her, somehow, or…invisible, maybe. But he’s very insistent that she one and…I have to agree with the kid. A Ghost Child can’t learn or create or initiate anything, Joyce. They don’t _remember_. They don’t _grow_. But she can and she does.”

\---  
“Doggy-Andy-” She hiccups and stumbles forward through the snow, rubbing at her pale teary cheeks before El remembers that she isn’t supposed to touch and stops short, blinking at him in the midnight snowfall.

It doesn’t matter much that she remembers her manners when Andy bounds straight to El, shoving herself against the little girl’s scrawny body, shivering in her stolen coat. 

“Goddamn it, Andraste,” Hopper mutters, rubbing uncomfortably at the back of his neck. Okay, so he’s been _concerned_ for her, and he supposes that concern has to slip out eventually.

El can feel it as she bends down to hug Andy around the neck, the dog snuffling against her face, licking at her chilled skin. Sindri gave her names for the things she feels from them. Words like worry, and pain, and love.

Hopper makes her smile with his dumb dancing, but he lets her sit and hold Andy while he’s cleaning up the cabin, making it fit for human life. Touching El is a strange kind of pain – she’s still mostly made of the emotion of yearning loneliness – but they both prefer the pain that comes with knowing El is there to the pain of wondering if she’s alright.

El falls asleep with Andy nearly taking up all the room in the bed. “_Andraste_,” he says, exasperated. “Give it a rest.”

“Andy stay!” El squeaks, arms tightening around her neck. 

Andy huffs at Hopper, settling stubbornly on top of the covers. “She’s _cold,_ Jim.” El frowns a little, confused, but Hopper knows that Andy isn’t talking about her body. She licks her cheek, making El giggle. “Time to sleep, pup.”

“P…up?”

“It’s a baby dog,” Hopper says gruffly, reaching out to give shoulder a gentle squeeze.

“I’m…pup?”

“You are,” Andy confirms softly, laying her big head down on Eleven’s sternum. “Our pup. Sleep now.”

“…okay.”

Far below them, beneath the snow and frozen earth, in a room that was somehow too bright and too dim at once, chains sway and rattle uneasily as the creature within scrambles around blindly.

The daemon has neither human nor name and her shape flickers uneasily, shifting until she can find something that fits, as comfortable as her comfortless world gets.

Chained to the wall like an ordinary animal, she shivers with a cold that doesn’t come from her body, cowering against the wall of her cell. Isolated and lonely, the little beagle raises her head and gives a desperate howl.

**Author's Note:**

> Daemons named here:  
Andraste ("Andy") - Hopper's daemon, a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Means 'invincible' or 'unconquerable'. The Celtic goddess of victory.  
Belenos - Sarah's daemon, unsettled. Means 'shining one'.  
Celestis - Nancy's daemon, a snowy owl. Means 'heavenly' or 'divine'.  
Ithunna - Jonathan's daemon, a boomslang. Means 'again to love'.  
Sindri - Joyce's daemon, a diademed sifaka. Means 'sparkling' - in Norse legends, this is the name of the hall in which the virtuous will dwell when Ragnarok ends.  
Themis - Mike's daemon, unsettled. Means 'divine law, justice'.
> 
> All retrievers are robust, playful goofballs to some extent, but the Chessie is the most serious (and stubborn) of them. Arguably, they're also the most hardy, able to spend hours diving into ice-cold waters and break through ice with their large chests. (But they're still fantastic cuddlers!) 
> 
> Diademed sifakas ("shi-fahk") are gorgeous lemurs. Despite being an endangered species, infants have very low mortality rates because the female sifaka is an extremely attentive mother. Joyce is a very lovely person but not particularly forward or showy - I wanted her to have a lovely but somewhat unconventional daemon.


End file.
